This poor, dusty blog. I promise to get around to being a better blogger soon.

For now, I will enter my “white” photo here. This couple has become very special to me, as I have had the opportunity to photograph their maternity session, their beautiful home birth, and then a week later, their sweet little baby girl. They live near the beach, and we used the water as a “setting” to their birth story throughout… Here on the east coast, the only way to get light like this on the beach is be there for the sun to rise. Thankfully, new parents aren’t phased by super early hours!

I had this session on Friday. After seeing this week’s contest, I knew I had to find a photo of this boy and enter it. It was actually tough to pick just one photo because his eyes were so incredible in every shot. They are dark brown and twinkle. He has that way of looking into my camera and cutting through the rest of the scene with those soulful eyes, irresistible eyes. AND he was as beautiful a boy as his face suggests. Perfectly mannered, loving to his brand new baby sister, and all around adorable 5-year-old.

FYI: I did no sort of magic photoshoppery to this image other than a black and white conversion from a Kellie Hatcher preset in ACR. No eyeball sharpening or brightening.

To see more amazing eyes, head over to I Heart Faces this week by clicking the link below.

UPDATE: I’m so honored to have been in the top ten this week for this image! 9th place. Woot!

This is one goes into my top five favorite images.

Everything beautiful is here. Her face, the ocean, the sun, the light, her belly, the calm, the salt, the sparkles. I can hear the muffled water in her ears and feel the anticipation of the arrival of her first baby, a girl. Looking at this image makes me feel happy about the beauty in the world.

I shoot almost 99 percent of my stuff with my nifty fifty. I have to FORCE myself to use my kit lens. (nikkor 18-105 3.56mm) It is a stepchild in my camera bag. But one thing I do like about it is how wide I can get with it. Most of the shots I take with it, I have set on 18mm focal length. Anyway, this is getting camera technical geeky here, but the point is, sometimes you can get a more unique perspective if you practice doing things that are out of norm. My result was this shot, and I’m grateful for it!

Today, we made a fairy castle and left it on our front porch outside.
“If the fairies come and land inside, we’ll get a microscope and see them, okay?”
She was inspired by the new Tinkerbell movie on the Disney channel this week.
We googled “what do fairies eat?” Turns out they like natural kinds of foods, so we decided on peanuts.
That created a problem, though, because the birds might eat them.
Problem solved. We’d put a “no birds” sign in the castle.
“Oh, what about the ants?!”
“Don’t worry, they are very small and won’t eat too much,” I promised her.
“Do fairies get boogers?”
I told her that fairies are pretty much like tiny little people, so they probably get colds and boogers like we do.
So she put a wipie inside, right next to the bathtub.
“Do you think the mommy fairies will give the baby fairies the stickers? Like you do?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
When she was all finished adding everything to the castle, she was very pleased with herself.
“It’s like a carnival in there!”

There is a hint of skepticism about all this magic and fairies, even as she’s building her make believe world.
Everything is hinged on the fact that the tooth fairy exists, therefore other fairies must exist. “Right?”
Even though her classmate, a bigger boy, has told her repeatedly that the tooth fairy and Santa, and all of it are bunk, she isn’t ready yet to let go.
Thank goodness. I love that her pink plastic castle is there, outside, waiting for the fairies to visit and be happy for all the offerings.
I love that she counted the peanuts — six of them — to check again in the morning to see if any would be gone.
And I’m glad she was so excited to wear her silly monkey pants to school today for pajama day.

Oh, and the other one? Well, I mostly tried to fend her off from destroying her sister’s castle. She looked adorable in her little preppy dress.

But then it became too difficult to photograph and keep her from wrecking Zoey’s stuff. So I put her in the chair to eat. And as it often does, we went from adorable to this:

Zoey rarely accessorizes. In fact, never. But for her field day at school, the kids were allowed to wear hats. I was pleased to snap a couple pics of her before school in the morning. She often gazes off like this in the midst of whatever she’s doing. So here’s my yellow entry for I Heart Faces this week.